For the past three months, James Gorman, Chairman and CEO of American multinational investment management and financial services company Morgan Stanley, has been sharing his thoughts on crypto (and more specifically Bitcoin).
On 29 September 2022, during an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC’s “Mad Money”, Gorman said:
“What I’ve been worried about the last few years is the number of people who’ve been speculating in crypto, but, you know, it’s fine if bought at $600 and it’s at $20,000… Listen, I think it’s an asset. It’s a speculative asset by definition. I don’t think it’s a new form of stored value. I think it’s subject to a lot of regulatory risk.
“I wish I bought it at $600, but I’m glad I didn’t buy it at $60,000… I’ve seen a lot of individual investors get caught up in the hype. We’ve seen this before — dot-com. We saw this in the early 90s and 87 with the Black Monday crash and so on. My worry for that group is ‘listen, your job is not to speculate’. It’s to build long-term wealth with stability.
“The very wealthy are completely different. They could put one percent of their money on anything. They could put it on race horses, put it on crypto, put it on whatever they like; that’s fine. That’s no risk because they can afford to lose it. So, completely different folk.“
Then, on 14 October 2022, CoinDesk reported that Gorman had said the following about crypto during his firm’s Q3 2022 earnings call:
“I don’t think crypto’s a fad, I don’t think it’s going away… I don’t know what the value of bitcoin should or shouldn’t be, but these things aren’t going away and the blockchain technology supporting it is obviously very real and powerful… For us, honestly it’s just not a huge part of the business demand for our clients.. That may evolve and will evolve with it, but certainly it’s not what’s driving our economics one way or the other.“
Then, on 6 December 2022, Reuters reported that on 1 December 2022, while speaking at the Reuters NEXT conference, the Morgan Stanley CEO had this to say about Bitcoin:
“I don’t think it’s a fad or going away, but I can’t put an intrinsic value on it.“
